ACEP sold 70,000 units in its first week, or less than one-third what a PlayStation 3 entry in the series sold in August of last year. Still, this was good enough for first place because of a sudden drop in Monster Hunter Freedom 3's sales.

Last week, MHF3 sold 133,000 units. This week, the figure dropped sharply to 68,000. While it's common for games to see significant drops in sales in the weeks following release, a more likely cause in this case is hardware shortages. The PSP has been going through a hardware shortage of late, which made hardware sales plummet from 100,000 units to 29,000 last week and remain around the same this week.

We'll have to keep watching the charts to see how the PSP and Monster Hunter do in the coming weeks. The Japanese hardware scene could be seeing some significant changes shortly. 3DS pre-orders kicked off this week, a little over one month ahead of the system's February 26 release, and the reaction we saw pretty much guarantees that Nintendo will sell out of all stock come launch day. On the PSP front, Sony and Capcom will be bundling the system with Monster Hunter Freedom 3 in early February. And, of course, there are some pretty solid reports going around that a PSP successor will be announced as early as next week.

How all these developments will effect the weekly sales charts is anyone's guess at this point, but you can be sure we'll provide you with Media Create's sales figures every week so that you can keep track of what's up in Japan.

Here's the software top 20 covering 1/10 to 1/16. Publisher, platform, release date and life to date sales are in parentheses.